The 6 Places You Eat in College

This place is always French or "continental," and even at brunch, eggs and toast cost $14. They have no specials, happy hour, or coupons, and everything is plainly five to ten dollars more than is reasonable. Too bad is the only ritzy place in town, so when your parents visit you take them here to get a $21 Croque Monsieur (read: ham and cheese sandwich). Your Dad complains about the prices, your mom speaks way too deliberately to the waitress who is possibly faking her French accent, and your food often arrives cold. But the bread is always phenomenal.

Dining halls, unfortunately, can never make anyone happy. The food is never hot enough, varied enough, or plentiful enough. They're accused of all kinds of offenses — putting beef stock in the vegan lentil soup, or laxatives in the egg substitute. You, as a student, will never have to take responsibility and acknowledge that you have constant diarrhea because you haven't eaten anything from the plant family, or not from the animal or pastry family, in weeks. The griping over the dining hall food will always rage on, but at least acknowledge its few perks: free flatware and utensils and the opportunity to impose friendship upon your fellow freshmen by unceremoniously plopping down at an empty seat at their table. If you can ask them what their majors are before they tell you that seat is taken, you win.

This deli has black grime in every nook, and is less a retail space than a former alley between actual retail spaces. It's probably infested with every possible kind of vermin but, by God, does it make the BEST sandwich. This place hasn't had a stern cleaning in decades, yet still has a sense of pride that manifests itself in carrying the fanciest deli meats and cheeses and making cheap, mind-blowing sandwiches that let you forget all your problems and lose yourself in their mysterious special sauce. The only thing that keeps you from eating this ambrosial sandwich for every meal is the legend of an engineering student who did exactly that and died of scurvy.

Of course the grocery store tops all your other choices in selection, so you go in thinking you can't possibly be disappointed. But the trade-off is having to buy stuff in bulk, so when you come here to get lunch you end up eating way too much of exactly one thing — an entire box of Triscuits, for instance, or a block of cheese, washed down with Vitamin Water. Likewise, when you are actually grocery-shopping you shy away from any perishables, since you'll never finish them, so instead of buying healthy things like milk and vegetables, you get Gatorade and the cheap kind of boxed mac and cheese. Eventually you will think the cure for this predicament is "more roommates!" Too bad roommates are like a plague of locusts that hoover your cabinets dry, and your only defense will be to buy gross crap that no one else likes. Like cheap boxed mac and cheese.

Now, none of the places listed here are a boon to your health. But that pub near your school that does trivia not once, but twice per week, is far and away the reason you're fat. You don't even know why you go for trivia night specifically anymore, since your mouth is too full of beer and cheesy gravy fries to answer any questions. Worse, you have other friends that for some reason don't play trivia and want to go on the off-nights, and before you realize you've spent an entire semester eating dinner at this grease trap. But all is not lost— eventually you might become too superior to go out somewhere that has Bud Light on tap, and will migrate to a biergarten of some kind that serves ten-dollar half-liters of beers you can't pronounce.

You've texted every single person in your phone's address book to ask "have you eaten yet?" and no one is biting. So, fine, it's dinner for one from your tiny dorm room refrigerator and pantry (i.e. The floor under your bed). What'll it be — cereal? Granola bars? Another kind of cereal? You briefly entertain the idea of cooking some pasta in the hall kitchen, and then remember there was a clique of friends all making dinner together in there an hour ago. So you scrape the mold off that hunk of cheese that mysteriously went bad in two days, pour a bowl of Apple Jacks, and eat at your desk. You pretend that this just gives you more time to do your homework, but end up eating your "dinner" off your Shakespeare notes while watching old episodes of "Friends."